Columbine Made Simple
“You mean, you got a PhD in psychology and you never learned that humor makes fun of people?!”
The true meaning of the school massacres and what the country should be learning from them.
Section Six
Columbine high school massacre:
THE MISSING ELEMENT
by Izzy Kalman, MS
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Teasing is a confusing issue for modern man. Most of us don't really understand it, nor do we know how to deal with it other than by condemning it, and it's getting worse as time goes by. The reason for our difficulty in understanding teasing is that it is part of a major human drive that is almost entirely ignored by all branches of study of human behavior, whether it's psychology, sociology, religion, or education. This drive is unique to human beings. It is a drive that we almost constantly seek to satisfy, engage in it more than in sex and violence (the two major drives that are studied by psychology) combined, and is absolutely essential for human health, happiness, and resilience.
What is this drive? It is the need for laughter! We are all familiar with the saying, made famous by Readers Digest, that Laugher is the Best Medicine. In fact, scientific research has proven that the body actually produces healing chemicals when we laugh. Recent chart-busting movies like Patch Adams and Life Is Beautiful showed how humor enables people to heal from illness and to face up to life's most horrible conditions (though these movies haven't really taught us anything that we haven't already known for millennia). We all love speakers who make us laugh, and children's most beloved teachers are those with a sense of humor. The most widely read sections of newspapers and magazines are the comics and humor pages. The average person is addicted to watching a couple of hours of comedy on TV every day. The "life of the party" is the person who is able to keep everyone laughing. Wood Allen's witticism that "Sex is the most fun you can have without laughing" makes us aware that laughter is on par with the life's ultimate pleasure.
One of the things that differentiates homo sapiens from the other animals is our ability to laugh. While some intelligent primates, like chimpanzees and orangutans, show some laughing behavior, none of them laugh as deeply and as frequently as we do. Laughter is a universal human phenomenon, and children the world over begin laughing at a very early age. It is not a learned behavior -- it emerges spontaneously in all of us, and we find ourselves laughing against our will when something strikes us as funny. Human beings have been probably been laughing for hundreds of thousands of years, and the drive to laugh has become solidly embedded in our genes. A human being who does not have the capacity to laugh is probably autistic, or has some other serious mental disorder.
Isn't it amazing, then, that laughter and humor are almost ignored in academic study of human beings? You can look at textbook after textbook, and you will probably find nothing on humor and laughter. Chances are that if they mention the word humor, it means one of the bodily fluids that scientists once believed determined personality. There are, in fact, some psychological writings that deal with humor, but they are considered to be minor areas and are not included in the curriculum of psychological study.
But it's not only the academic world that's ignorant about laughter. Almost every one of us is ignorant about the nature of the laughter that we are doing every day. All of us will probably agree that laughter is a very important and wonderful part of human existence -- you might even feel that life without laughter is life not worth living! But have you ever bothered to examine what it is that makes us laugh? Do we ever laugh at images of courage, wisdom, honor, generosity, achievement, or good fortune? Of course not! We don't laugh when people look good. We only laugh when people look stupid or miserable! Just try to find a joke that doesn't make fun of anyone! And the more the ridiculous the people look, the harder we laugh.
In other words, since laughter is so good for us, it must be good for us to make fun of people! But this is where we come into a bind. Modern society teaches us, from the time we are little children, that it is bad for us to make fun of people! Parents begin punishing their children as soon as they can talk for calling their brothers and sisters bad names, even though they clearly delight in doing this to each other (at least until they start getting punished for it)! This teaching is then forcibly continued in school. Our healthy instincts tell us that we should make fun of each other, but our morality tells us that we shouldn't do it. We must deny our basic instincts. This is a real recipe for neurosis! No wonder we are confused about teasing!
Nevertheless, hard as society may try, it cannot legislate away the need for people to laugh at each other. Despite the years that society trains us not to make fun of each other, it only succeeds partially. By adulthood, we have more-or-less learned not to make fun of others to their face, but we spend a good portion of our social time laughing at people who aren't present. And it's also why this same society provides us with round- the-clock comedy: so that we can indulge in our need for laughter by voyeuristically watching highly paid professional actors making each other look like idiots. However, unlike sex and violence, comedy has no rating system. Children of all ages are freely permitted to watch people being made to look like idiots (as long as it contains no sex or violence). And we never even make the connection that the humor we are watching is something that we consider to be immoral in real life!
The confusion we have about teasing is not an inevitable part of human life. It is only a result of our "civilized" culture. Perhaps the best way to discover true human nature is to examine human groups that have not become civilized. An excellent example is the Pygmies, who (at least until recent years) have lived for eons like our prehistoric ancestors, in totally self-sufficient tribal groups, under the canopy of the forest. In his classic book on Pygmies, The Forest People, anthropologist Collin Turnbull says, "The BaMbuti [Pygmies] are good-natured people with an irresistible sense of humor; they are always making jokes about one another, and even about themselves..." You will also find this freedom in teasing one another in all primitive peoples. This is our true human nature, and it is not a bad thing. The repression of our natural desire to laugh at each other has not made us better people, and it has not made us happier.
It is time that society realized that teasing is a biologically ordained instinct that we all enjoy. And we should realize that children who tease others are not any more evil than you and I. Nor, for that matter, are victims of teasing any less evil than their teasers. After all, it is not the popular macho jock types who have been committing massacres: it is their rejected and dejected victims who metamorphose into murderous monsters.
